It is not like I am leaving the race early. I have been boarding the pain train for nearly four decades. After all that time, the humiliations do tend to mount.

If you run, you know what I mean.

The rabid dogs. The misaligned sidewalk blocks that always seem to be outside swanky outdoor cafes. The way that, at the end of some long race, it is like you have sprung a leak and all of the air is seeping out. And how it seems like the stranger along the side of the road is being ironic when he yells that you are “looking good” as you lurch like Quasimodo toward the finish line.

Perhaps, like me, you have been mocked in Italian by espresso-sipping Venetians as you ran along the Grand Canal. Or you have been pelted with stones when, closer to home, you strayed where you shouldn’t have (“Hey b’ye, you’re not from the Pier”).

Maybe, while running in green hospital orderly pants, you have been stopped by a cop suspecting you of being a psychiatric patient gone AWL.

Or while doing some mileage in a big city at an early hour, you were confronted by someone yelling in a loud voice as they materialized from the fog.

It is conceivable that you then started to reach for a rock. And that only a good memory for faces — and the vaguest knowledge of Shakespearean dialogue — prevented you from being a screaming headline in the next days newspaper: Startled Jogger Beats Canadian Theatrical Icon to a Pulp.

Sitting here gobbling anti-inflammatories instead of tapering for the Blue Nose Marathon has given me time to consider what running has taught me. It is not all bad.

I have learned that you see things differently travelling at street level, going past buildings you have never glimpsed before, inhabited by people who don’t even know you are out there.

I now understand the power of wind. I now know that there are intensities of exhaustion beyond “really, really tired.”

I have discovered the hideous texture of energy gels. But also that Moby’s Run On is one sure way to keep a person putting one foot in front of the other.

I now realize that cool guys don’t jog on the spot — or worse yet, do some kind of exercise-class cardio moves — while waiting for the light to change.

And that bathrooms in gas stations, coffee shops and other public buildings are the height of civilization.

Thanks to running, I now understand that there is really no such thing as “flat” and that “fartlek” is a Swedish mode of interval training, not something that will get you a couple of years in the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility.

I now also know that the joy of a so-called “runner’s high” is akin to what you feel when you hit your thumb over and over again with a hammer for a long time and then finally stop.

On the other hand, I have running to thank for my ability — whenever I pass a group of female runners — to adopt a breezy manner that, no matter how tired I am, implies that I could keep this up for at least another 20 kilometres.

That, of course, was almost always a bald-faced lie.

Someone once told me that running long distances is all about listening to your mind say “keep going” while your body screams “dear God, please stop.”

That certainly squares with my experience. As lots of people at the Blue Nose starting line will tell you, running for long periods of time is about surmounting pain. When you do, the feeling is epic.

Which is why, come Sunday, I will be relieved to be standing on the side of the road watching the runners stagger by in their haze of agony. But the crazy thing is that I will be jealous, too.

John DeMont is the senior writer for the Chronicle Herald.

In the future, his column will appear in The Chronicle Herald’s Weekend edition.